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Advantages and disadvantages of eCommerce |
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Think of eCommerce and the first few
features that strike any mind are – a global marketplace
– increased sales – increased profits! Not
that you start claiming better margin of profit online,
but because various expenses relating to marketing,
promotional material, order processing, customer care,
inventory management, information storage, telecommunications
et al, considerably slash down.
eCommerce offers tempting but economical boost to any
size or kind of business. By opting for eCommerce, you
can expand your market margins to global horizons or
squeeze them to highly focused market segments, as per
subjective business acumen and discretion. Even a small-scale
business offering quality and reliability with confidence
can easily find itself brushing shoulders with its esteemed
competitors in least gestation period. It facilitates
wishful manifestation of your business entity –
as grand and sophisticated as you wish it to be. Budget
would not really restrain you here from showcasing your
attitude and essence through your website and online
shopping cart.
Things considerably simplify with eCommerce –
be it changing prices listed on your web page or customization
of products; applying innovative business models or
business process re-engineering; implementing higher
degree of specialization or enhancing productivity and
customer care – everything hardly takes time to
implement/ incorporate and exhibit.
Not to mention, quality eCommerce services collect and
manage valuable customer-related information, including
customer’s ordering patterns, to build a comprehensive
customer database. This database vitally sharpens your
marketing and promotion strategies to be remarkably
on target.
As regards your business partners, eCommerce aids you
in minimizing supply chain inefficiencies, bringing
about reduced inventory requirement and lessened delivery
delays, thereby rendering you more confident about your
business collaborations with your suppliers and service
companies. eCommerce inherently streamlines and automates
the entire backend business process, assimilating speed
and efficiency to your business activities.
As you introduce eCommerce facility to your customers,
you render their shopping experience highly fluent and
convenient. eCommerce seems all the more indispensable
for your customers in the wake of consistently shrinking
time with them to spare for shopping offline. What’s
more, online shopping lets your customers reap benefits
of online economies, as they often pay lesser price
for identical products/ services available offline.
eCommmerce-based business benefits the society as well!
As your onsite manpower requirement reduces, it lessens
the burden on infrastructure and lowers demand for elaborate
office complexes and spacious parking lots.
As good as it may sound, eCommerce has its own share
of obstacles too that hold it back from assuming it’s
full potential. To begin with, Internet in itself is
still to touch the lives of a large chunk of people
as an integral way of life. There are tangible privacy
and security issues that keep people on guard, as they
face a dilemma each time they need to divulge highly
personal information online, as and when they transact
online.
Non-standardized protocols for certain processes, insufficient
telecommunications bandwidth and ever-evolving software
tools (with incrementing versions), are some of the
technical issues that contain eCommerce from being a
seamlessly integrated component of the contemporary
organizational IT systems.
While technical limitations are completely resolvable,
non-technical issues including people’s resistance
to change and lack of trust for faceless and paperless
transactions, is bound to take its due time before it
completely erodes. In fact, eCommerce is fast catching
up with the rest of the world, as USA online markets
lead them by example.
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Source:http://www.articlealley.com/article_176581_15.html
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